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 the Codex. Obsolete rules of law were to be passed over. The work was to be distributed into 50 books. The constitution containing these directions is dated Dec. 530. The commissioners promptly set to work, reading no less than 2,000 treatises for the purpose of making extracts. The work, to which the names of Digesta or Pandectae (Πανδέκται—all receivers) are indifferently given by Justinian, was completed in the autumn of 533 and published with two prefatory constitutions on Dec. 16. Each book is divided into titles, each title into extracts. The total number of titles is 432, and of extracts from 39 jurists 9,123. The whole book is published as an imperial constitution, deriving its force from the imperial sanction, which abrogated all pre-existing law, except that contained in the Codex and subsequently published constitutions. No judge nor advocate might travel out of the four corners of these two new statutes, the Codex and the Digesta.

While the Digest was in progress, Justinian directed three of the chief commissioners—Tribonian, Theophilus professor of law in the university of Constantinople, and Dorotheus professor of law at Berytus (Beyrut in Syria, the other great law-school of the empire)—to prepare an elementary manual for educational purposes, based on the existing treatises, and especially on the deservedly popular Institutes of Gaius, but brought up to the state of the law as changed by recent emperors and by Justinian himself. This treatise, dealing in four books with the law of Persons, of Things, and of Actions, was published shortly before the Digest, not only as a text-book for teaching, but also as a law, a constitution with full imperial authority. It is the treatise now known as Justinian's Institutiones.

On Nov. 16, 534, a revised Codex, including constitutions published since 529, and omitting laws that had been in the interval repealed or become unnecessary, was issued with an introductory constitution (now prefixed to it) called Cordi nobis, abrogating the former edition altogether. The Codex we now have is this new one. It is divided into 12 books and 765 titles, containing 4,652 constitutions, the earliest dating from Hadrian, while far the larger part of the constitutions in the Codex were more recent, and perhaps half of them the work of the Christian emperors.

Between 534 and the end of Justinian's reign a large number of new laws appeared, the majority during the lifetime of Tribonian (d. 545). These are called Novellae Constitutiones post Codicem (νεαραὶ διατάξεις), or shortly Novellae (νεαραί), Novels. They mostly have the form of edicts or general laws rather than of the earlier rescripta. They do not appear to have ever been gathered into one officially sanctioned volume (although this had originally been promised, see Const. Cordi nobis), but several private collections were made from which our present text is derived. (See as to the Novels Biener, Gesch. der Novellen Justinians, and generally as to the history and edd. of the Corpus Juris, Rudorff, Römische Rechtsgeschichte, Leipz. 1857.)

The Corpus Juris Civilis, consisting of the four parts already mentioned—the Codex, the Digesta, the Institutiones, and the Novellae—became under Justinian the sole law of the Roman empire, was accepted in the early Middle Ages as the law of Germany, S. France, and Italy, and has exerted a great influence on the jurisprudence even of countries which, like England, repudiate (except in special departments) its authority. As we now understand by codification the reduction of the whole law into one scientific system of rules, new in form and expression though mostly old in substance, the work of Justinian would be better described as a Consolidation than a Codification. On the whole, it may be said that he exercised a wise discretion in attempting no more, and many as are the faults in the arrangement of his Codex and Digest and in the occasional disproportion of treatment, the work was done decidedly better than other literary and scientific productions of Justinian's age would have led us to expect.

The Corpus Juris held its ground as the supreme law book of the empire for little more than three centuries. Much of the earlier law had then become obsolete, and something shorter, less elaborate, more adapted to the needs and lower capacities of the time was required. Accordingly the emperors, Basil the Macedonian, Constantine, and Leo the philosopher, directed the preparation of a new law book, which, revised and finally issued under Leo c. 890, received the name of the Basilica, or Imperial Code. It contains, in 60 books, a complete system of law for the Eastern empire, retaining a great deal of the substance of the Corpus Juris, but in a wholly altered form; the extracts from the Codex of constitutions, and those from the Pandects and Novels being all thrown into one new Codex, and intermingled with later matter. It is in Greek; is much less bulky than the Corpus Juris, and has come down to us imperfect. The best ed. is Haimbach's (Leipz. 1833–1851), with supplement by Zacharia (Leipz. 1846). The Codex is cited in Herzog. vol. ix. (1901), according to the ed. of P. Krüger (Berlin, 1877); the Novellae according to the ed. of C. E. Zacharias a Lingenthal (2 vols. Leipz. 1881).

The new legislation of Justinian is contained partly in the Codex and partly in the Novels. The legal changes made by the constitutions of the first seven years of his reign, which have been incorporated in the Codex, are often merely solutions of problems, or settlements of disputes which had perplexed or divided the earlier jurists. These were promulgated in the Quinquaginta Decisiones already mentioned. A considerable number more relate to administrative subjects; while the rest are miscellaneous, running over the whole field of law. For his ecclesiastical constitutions see articles in D. C. A., to which this subject more properly belongs. A few remarks may, however, be profitably made here on the emperor's ecclesiastical laws as contained firstly in the Codex Constitutionum, where they are abbreviated; and, secondly, in the Novels, where they appear at full and often wearisome length. The earlier ones are in the Codex, the Novels extend from 534 to 565.

In Justinian's Codex the first 13 titles of bk. i. are occupied by laws relating to Christian theology and doctrine. Title I., styled "De